accident but (if it must have them) of its own being, letters old and new honoured, Nature no longer violated, people smiling, children fat, songs and music, no financiers, silent politicians, decent buildings, good food and drink for all, numberless birds, no sportsmen or scientists or wars or lawyers or profits, fewer clamourers and charlatans, and, lord! this would be the best of all possible ages for a man to live in.

XXIX

MY DEAR X,

A BELATED ELIZABETHAN

My dispersed remarks about the Elizabethans have again put my nose to the bookish trail. Know you Lillo -George Lillo-the dramatist of the eighteenth century and the only romantic dramatist of our literature who still remains a suppliant to fame? Fate, accident have "covered all" his literary deeds his literary deeds" with those two narrow words, Hic jacet." His life need concern us little. He was born in 1693, and carried on the business of a jeweller in Moorfields (the Elizabethan resort, as "The Alchemist" puts it, of beggars, lepers and coneycatchers) until his death in 1739. Before the publication of his collected works in the middle of the century, the only and very defective account of him was in Colley Cibber's Lives. The "Life" in the collected edition adds little to Cibber, except to deny the legend of his death in extreme penury. Throughout, he seems to have lived the inconspicuous and uneventful life of a respectable tradesman, with play-writing only as an interlude or recreation from a prosperous career. Another edition of his plays was published in 1810, but that was the terminus at which he has remained ever since. Except in Bell's British Theatre (whose plays are merely reprints of bowdlerized

and prompt-book copies) and possibly a volume or two of miscellaneous plays, to the best of my knowledge none of his work has been published in any subsequent collection of old plays, and no criticism of him (except the briefest of notes in encyclopædias and their kind) has ever been attempted.* His only pyramid is a mound of invidious dust.

George Lillo (Chambers calls him "William ") wrote eight plays-Silvia, The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnewell, The Life of Scanderbeg, The Christian Hero, The Fatal Curiosity, Marina, Elmerick, and Arden of Feversham. Silvia is an extremely stilted exercise in the style of the average musical piece of the period written by scores by Bickerstaffs and other dramatists, which Lillo calls "A Pastoral Burlesque Serio-Comic Opera" and I a Fustiano-Opera-Bouffe. The Life of Scanderbeg (the title no doubt is taken from the lost old play of "Scanderbege ") is an adaptation of "Tamberlaine" in the style of Restoration heroic drama. The Christian Hero is-" The Christian Hero," worse even than Rowe; Marina is a lugubrious attempt to rewrite Pericles, and I never got any further than the first ten lines of Elmerick.

There remain three survivors, of which Fielding thought so well that he put on The Fatal Curiosity at the Haymarket in 1736, when he was manager there. This is not the only instance of his discernment, but it is surely the most remarkable. For the exciting thing about "George Barnwell," "Arden of Feversham,” and

* Since this letter was written, a study of Lillo has, I believe, been included in a book by Professor W. H. Hudson. I have not had the opportunity of reading it.

"The Fatal Curiosity" is that they no more belong to the eighteenth century than did the "Songs of Innocence.' Lillo, too, did not come at the tired end of a period. Surely, to say the least, it is one of the "curiosities of literature" that a comfortable jeweller, revolving in the hub of an epoch rolling sedately and deliberately many, many leagues from the Renaissance, should have written three tragedies which can barely be distinguished from the Elizabethan drama. What an odd aperçu he suggests, as the quiet tradesman, beguiling his leisure with old plays -he must have saturated himself in them! It is a phenomenon similar to that of Charles Wells and Beddoes in the nineteenth century-and more interesting, partly because the nineteenth century was less remote in feeling from the Elizabethans, and partly because Lillo is still damp with the waters of Lethe. But a phenomenon quite out of nature is that the other plays do not exhibit so much as a grain or atom of his Elizabethan qualities. They are typically bad eighteenth-century plays. Talk of dual identity!

Arden of Feversham is the most curious example of this incongruity. The anonymous old play (published in 1592) was attributed to Shakespeare, and Goethe, with his usual complacence, adjudicated it to Shakespeare's youth. I can hardly believe that he had ever read it, because its obvious characteristic is a maturity of style, passion and dramatic insight (in patches) totally unlike Shakespeare's earlier experiments. At any rate what Lillo did was to recast the old Arden, retaining the characters (even to their names), the plot, and, in numerous instances, almost an identity of phrase. I defy any but the trained expert to tell by internal evidence

which was written in 1592 and which in 1736. There are differences, but only of structure and psychology. As far as construction is concerned, Lillo's is the better play. The old Arden, like many of its brethren, is a play of sporadic magnificence in poetic intensity, wealth of diction, and human intuition; Lillo's Arden is less brilliant, better balanced, more closely knit and unified. Also, in deflecting the psychology of Alice Arden, who in the old play conspires with Mosby to murder her husband, Lillo has made one striking improvement. He causes Arden's goodness of heart to make "Alicia " ashamed of her intrigue with Mosby and, in a scene of quiet beauty, to become reconciled with her husband. But Lillo keeps her character weak and vacillating as from the beginning. When Mosby and his bravoes break in and murder Arden her initiative is paralysed. This sure dramatic treatment both complicates and intensifies the emotional reaction of Alicia after her husband's death. The parallel of Alicia, in the Elizabethan drama, is in fact Mrs. Frankfort in Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness.'

"George Barnwell," which, it is said, drew more tears from the audience than all "the rant of Alexander the Great," is not such a dramatic achievement as the other two. It is written in a heavyish prose which-an important point-veils blank verse and exhibits only one figure of large interest-a figure of perverted greatness exactly in the lofty, generous manner of the Elizabethan superegoists. That figure is Millwood, the woman, the giantess who twists Barnwell to her will and tempts him to his utter ruin. There is a grand scene where Millwood turns upon her pursuers and burns their hypocrisy and